[DEBATE] : (Fwd) Africa's environment ever more despoiled

[Patrick Bond]

The Mercury

Death of a lake

June 12, 2008 Edition 1

Tony Carnie

STARK visual evidence showing the steady degradation of Africa's rich 
natural resources has been presented to some of the continent's most 
senior environmental custodians.

More than 300 satellite photographs, some going back almost 40 years, 
clearly illustrate a steady deterioration of the natural environment 
which is visible from the sky.

Contained in the new publication Africa: Atlas of Our Changing 
Environment, the before-and-after images show a 50% decline in glaciers 
and snow cover in the Ruwenzori mountains of Uganda between 1987 and 
2003, as well as a significant loss of snow on Kilimanjaro, Africa's 
highest mountain.

The Atlas was presented to several African ministers of the environment 
this week by national environment minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk and 
the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep).

They are meeting in Johannesburg for the 12th African Ministerial 
Conference on the Environment .

One of the most graphic examples of changing climatic conditions and 
desertification is reflected by the gradual death of Lake Chad in 
north-western Africa.

One of the earliest black-and-white satellite photographs, from 1963, 
shows a vast lake stretching across the boundaries of four nations 
(Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria). But over the next four decades, the 
size of the lake shrinks dramatically to cover just the borderline 
between Cameroon and Chad.

Other photographs show similarly stark contractions in the size of 
forests and national parks, especially in the Democratic Republic of 
Congo and Rwanda. The Virunga and Volcans national parks, the last main 
refuge for Africa's mountain gorillas, are seen in the latest photos as 
a tiny island of green encircled by subsistence farmers and loggers - 
thousands of whom have settled in the parks as the soils and natural 
resources are exhausted elsewhere.

Other images show an ever- expanding network of dirt roads creeping out 
into formerly impenetrable forests now vulnerable to commercial bushmeat 
hunters and timber cutters.

There are aerial photographs of Cairo, Tripoli and Lagos and many other 
major cities which have swollen into huge human sponges as farmers 
desert the land.

Achim Steiner, the director-general of Unep, said Africa was losing more 
than four million hectares of forest every year, twice the world's 
average deforestation rate.

Soil was also bleeding away in many places, with up to 50 metric tons of 
soil per hectare being eroded in some areas.

The Atlas shows that soil erosion and chemical and physical damage have 
degraded about 65% of the continent's farmlands.

It says that more than 300 million Africans already face water scarcity 
and that climate change is one of the major driving forces for the loss 
of water reserves.

 From southern Africa, some of the images depict the rapid growth of 
irrigated sugar cane fields and new pulp plantations, along with a 
steady loss of native fynbos vegetation north of Cape Town.

Yet, there are also a few positive stories.

For example, the rate of forest-clearing around Mount Kenya has been 
curbed significantly after recent policy changes and stricter law 
enforcement.

Some park areas in Tunisia are also recovering fast since the government 
has acted to halt overgrazing and also reintroduced the scimitar-horned 
oryx, which is on the verge of extinction.